take your answer off the air...

Talker's MagazineThe quirky talk radio trade mag. Check the Talk Radio Research Project- it's not very scientific, but places on the top 15 talkers list (scroll down to Talk Radio Audiences By Size)) are as hotly contested as Emmys (and mean just about as much).

The AdvocateNo, not THAT Advocate... it's the Northwest Progressive Institute's Official Blog.

Media MattersDocumentation of right-wing media in video, audio and text.

Orcinushome of David Neiwert, freelance investigative journalist and author who writes extensively about far-right hate groups

Hominid Views"People, politics, science, and whatnot"
Darryl is a statistician who fights imperialism with empiricism, gives good links and wry commentary.

Jesus' General An 11 on the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender, a 12 on the Heavenly Scale of the 10 Commandments and a 6 on the earthly scale of the Immaculately Groomed.

Irrational Public Radio "informs, challenges, soothes and/or berates, and does so with a pleasing vocal cadence and unmatched enunciation. When you listen to IPR, integrity washes over you like lava, with the pleasing familiarity of a medium-roast coffee and a sensible muffin."

The Moderate VoiceThe voice of reason in the age of Obama, and the politics of the far-middle.

News Hounds Dogged dogging of Fox News by a team who seems to watch every minute of the cable channel so you don't have to.

HistoryLinkFun to read and free encyclopedia of Washington State history. Founded by the late Walt Crowley, it's an indispensable tool and entertainment source for history wonks and surfers alike.

right-wing blogs we like

The Reagan WingHearin lies the real heart of Washington State Republicans. Doug Parris runs this red-meat social conservative group site which bars no holds when it comes to saying who they are and who they're not; what they believe and what they don't; who their friends are and where the rest of the Republicans can go. Well-written, and flaming.

July 06, 2012

Your weekend open thread

* While most Americans were celebrating the birth of a nation of patriots, the Republican nominee for president, who made much of his fortune sending American prosperity abroad and sheltering much of his wealth in offshore tax shelters, and Republican leaders in Washington, who would make the practice of firing teachers and police the policy of the state, eagerly awaited a jobs report they fervently hope will be bad for America. (see below)

Mitt Romney is in trouble. The American people do not like him or trust him. They intuitively sense that he’s not on their side. They are right. He is not. And it shows.

While the stampeding herd of the media were dramatically overstating the problems of the president, informing the nation about celebrity divorces rather than demanding that the Republican nominee stop hiding his tax returns for reasons that are obvious, Romney was failing to win the trust of the nation.

In the latest big lie of the far right, while the president was honoring American heroes at home on the Fourth of July, the right invented the fiction that the president was campaigning in France. Since the answer to the big lie is the big truth:

It is time to talk of patriotism and partisanship and a Republican Party that has lost its heart, its soul and its way. Ronald Reagan would be embarrassed by Republicans today. William F. Buckley would be angry and ashamed. The party of Reaganite optimism is now the party that hopes America fails and blames Americans first.

The Republican Party is now led by a man who insults his own father, a great man who believed the people have a right to know about those who would lead them. George Romney disclosed many years of his tax returns because he was proud of what he did, unlike Mitt Romney, who is not.

Mitt Romney says George Romney was wrong. The American people believe George Romney was right.

Never in the history of the republic has any great party been so passionately hopeful that America would fail as Republicans are today.

Never in the history of the nation has any great party dreaded good news for America the way Republicans do today.

Never in the history of America has any great party so callously and falsely blamed Americans who are jobless for being jobless, blamed Americans who are poor for being poor, blamed Americans who are hungry for being hungry or blamed Americans who are hurting for their hurt as Republicans do today.

Never in the history of the Congress has any leader done what the Republican Senate leader did, boasting that his great dream for America was not putting Americans to work, but politically destroying the president.

While then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) passed job-creating legislation in the Democratic House, Senate Republicans abused the filibuster even more than the bigot senators of the old segregated South in their drive to make America fail. Senate Republicans destroy America's hope for jobs with the same ferocity of their leader's hyper-partisan ambition to destroy the president.

Never in the history of the nation has any great party been led by a man who praises his own wealth with such conceit and claims this as his qualification for the presidency. Even leading Republicans have called him a vulture.

The party of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt is now the party of “no” that hopes America fails and blames Americans first.

* The jobs report for June was released today. "The economy added 80,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, after a revised increase of 77,000 in May. The unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent." Still slower than what the economy needs to recover, but not the devastating news hoped for by those on the right.

In Britain, the investigations into Barclays Bank manipulating the benchmark Libor rate have begun in earnest. Parliament approved an official inquiryinto the Libor scandal, though only at the Parliamentary level rather than an independent investigation. This came after a shouting match between the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and the shadow chancellor, Labour’s Ed Balls. Outside of Parliament, the Serious Fraud Office announced their own criminal investigations. So we’re on the road to seeing criminal prosecutions come out of the rate-rigging scandal.

Remember that Barclays is only bearing the full weight of scrutiny right now because they decided to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation. At least 12 and as many as 16 other banks are under scrutiny in the scandal, and that includes just about every major financial institution. The fallout from that DoJ investigation is that the Libor will get calculated in a new fashion:

Under the terms of the pact with the US’ Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Barclays agreed to a six-pronged plan to “encourage” benchmark publishers, such as the British Bankers’ Association, to improve the rate-setting process by increasing transparency and creating rigorous methodologies to determine submissions.

The pact is unusual because it requires Barclays to not only beef up its internal compliance systems but to take on a role as an advocate for increased oversight for the industry.

“We’re going to use every tool we can, whether it’s enforcement tools or rule-writing tools to try to benefit the American public and make sure markets are clean of fraud and manipulation,” said Gary Gensler, chairman of the CFTC.

Martin Wheatley, the UK regulator who has been asked by the UK government to lead a review of the legal framework for Libor and other rates, said his group would consider the CFTC’s demands. The BBA is conducting its own review and a person familiar with the progress said the settlement demands were “quite sensible” and could provide a template for reform.

It would certainly represent progress for the settlement to contain new standards to prevent future rate manipulation, but it would be harder to hold to them without some accountability for those who manipulated the rates. That’s why calls to purge the entire Barclay's board, which is simultaneously tied up with just about every other multinational corporate board, seem more appropriate.

*A worker in Florida got an earful from Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) on Wednesday when he asked the congressman to support a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour.

"Jesse Jackson, Jr. is passing a bill around to increase the minimum wage to 10 bucks an hour," the man tells Young in a video obtained by FLDemocracy. "Do you support that?"

"Probably not," Young replies.

"Ten bucks, that would give us a living wage," the constituent points out.

"How about getting a job?" Young snaps.

"I do have one, $8.50 an hour," the man insists.

"Why do you want that benefit?" Young grumbles. "Get a job."

"I do have a job, but it's not enough to get by on," the man explains as Young turns away.

Comments

If you think Democrats are going to take away your Bible, you're an idiot. If you think Democrats are going to take away your guns, you're an armed idiot. If you think they're going to take away your guns and give them to Mexicans to kill your God, you're Bill O'Reilly!

Heart and soul? I'd say it's lost its honor. How can redistributing the wealth of the nation upwards until the average person has such a small slice of a very small portion? We are the richest country in the world and we have ever increasingly fewer and fewer safety nets.

I think we are going through our "monarchy" stage. Europeans (and those Canadians who remember it) have been there and done that. They're not giving away their citizen power. Only in the US where people have become fat and lazy and expect the rich to be honorable and fair.

It ain't gonna happen until we let them know it's wrong. We're going to see revolution. I betcha.

KS, you'll be one of the first to rebel. You don't know it yet, but your in the very category of people they are trying to take it from now.

Hey over on the Sound Politics site they are asking people to weigh in on what names they call liberals. Wow if we did that here, we would get all sorts of crap! I wonder if our resident conservatives, er, reasonable moderates ever tell them their blog is too partisan? HMM?? KS? Anyone??

The latest chapter on Jonathan Krohn being interviewed by Cenk and who just said that he . . . only heard conservative talk radio in Georgia his whole life and so regurgitated it without understanding it. As he got older, he began to realize "how much he didn't know. The more you know the more you realize you don't know."

That takes maturity. Michael Savage is stuck in preadolescence. KS, are you a pre-adolescent as well?

Right now I'm listening to three people making stupid sounds while holding up a pizza box, a dog, and a fish. If that isn't a reflection on the times in which we're living, I don't know what is.

I liked one entry in particular - so liberal progressives be called PROGS. So, back at ya - Sparky, T-S and fellow leftists or social democrats.

BTW - Sparky - do you have any evidence that
Canadians who have expensive surgeries down here reimburse us ? You slipped that one by a few posts ago, and was talking with some friends who are "moderates" and they doubted your claim, as do I until it is verified otherwise.

I suppose you aren't interested in contacting the office of the Canadian consulate, so I went to Wikipedia. If that isnt good enough for you, then you will just have to have your doubts. Makes no nevermind to moi.

"Canadians visiting the US to receive health care

Some residents of Canada travel to the United States because it provides the nearest facility for their needs. Some do so on quality grounds or because of easier access. A study by Barer, et al., indicates that the majority of Canadians who seek health care in the U.S. are already there for other reasons, including business travel or vacations. A smaller proportion seek care in the U.S. for reasons of confidentiality, including abortions, mental illness, substance abuse, and other problems that they may not wish to divulge to their local physician, family, or employer.

Canadians offered free care in the US paid by the Canadian government have sometimes declined it. In 1990 the British Columbia Medical Association ran radio ads asking, "What's the longest you'd wait in line at a bank before getting really annoyed? Five minutes? Ten minutes? What if you needed a heart operation?" Following this, the government responded, as summarized by Robin Hutchinson, senior medical consultant for the health ministry's heart program. Despite the medically questionable nature of heart bypass for milder cases of chest pain and follow-up studies showing heart bypass recipients were only 25-40% more likely to be relieved of chest pain than people who stay on heart medicine, the "public outcry" following the ads led the government to take action:

"'We did a deal with the University of Washington at Seattle' said Hutchinson.. to take 50 bypass cases at $18,000 per head, almost $3,000 higher than the cost in Vancouver, with all the money [paid by] the province..In theory, the Seattle operations promised to take the heat off the Ministry of Health until a fourth heart surgery unit opened in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster. If the first batch of Seattle bypasses went smoothly..then the government planned to buy three or four more 50-head blocks. But four weeks after announcing the plan, health administrators had to admit they were stumped. 'As of now..we've have nine people sign up. The opposition party, the press, everybody's making a big stink about our waiting lists. And we've got [only] nine people signed up! The surgeons ask their patients and they say, "I'd rather wait", We thought we could get maybe two hundred and fifty done down in Seattle..but if nobody wants to go to Seattle, we're stuck,'".[67]

In a Canadian National Population Health Survey of 17,276 Canadian residents, it was reported that only 0.5% sought medical care in the US in the previous year. Of these, less than a quarter had traveled to the U.S. expressly to get that care.[70]
A 2002 study by Katz, Cardiff, et al., reported the number of Canadians using U.S. services to be "barely detectible relative to the use of care by Canadians at home" and that the results "do not support the widespread perception that Canadian residents seek care extensively in the United States."[71]"

So, they buy it ahead of time in blocks of services. And the claims of all those Canadians racing to the US for treatments is false. But if they do come for serious surgery, it has been prearranged and paid for. Accidents are another matter and sometimes they pay out of pocket for that. But the original issue was some poor Canadian forced to go without heart surgery, and my answer was related to that.

KVI am 570 KHz Visit the burnt-out husk of one of the seminal right-wing talkers in all the land. Here's where once trilled the reactionary tones of Rush Limbaugh, John Carlson, Kirby Wilbur, Mike Siegel, Peter Weissbach, Floyd Brown, Dinky Donkey, and Bryan Suits.
Now it's Top 40 hits from the '60's & '70's aimed at that diminishing crowd who still remembers them and can still hear.

KTTH am 770 KHzRight wing home of local, and a whole bunch of syndicated righties such as Glennn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larsony, and for an hour a day: live & local David Boze.